China and the New
Cold War

by
Justin Raimondo6/17/99

The
burst of good old-fashioned "isolationism" on the Right that
followed the implosion of Communism and the end of the Cold War is in
danger of sputtering to an abrupt halt. From Pat Buchanan to Gary Bauer
to the congressional Republican leadership, just about every political
leader and ideologue of a conservative hue has been snookered by a concerted
campaign to demonize China as the new Evil Empire. A grand coalition that
spans the spectrum, from the AFL-CIO to the American Conservative Union,
is beating the drums for war with China.

The
labor unions want a trade war, as does Buchanan; the neoconservatives
are naturally in favor of any war, so long as it serves their vision
of a foreign policy that frankly aims at "world hegemony," as
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol likes to put it. Some Religious
Right leaders, notably Bauer, having despaired of ever abolishing the
National Endowment for the Arts, and, otherwise largely ignored by the
Republican congressional leadership, have signed on to the holy war against
"Red" China, alleging anti-Christian persecution. The Hollywood
crowd, steeped in New Age mysticism and enamored of Tibetan Buddhism,
is waging a war of images, with Sinophobic movies such as Kundun.
Bootlegged videos have flooded the Chinese market, and the movie moguls
are miffed; this, combined with Tinselstown's penchant for stagy self-righteousness,
has propelled the glitzy and the glamorous into the front ranks of the
China-haters.

The
Sinophobes almost never refer to China as simply 'China," but instead
raise the specter of "Red" China, or "Communist China."
Of course, it was never called this during the halcyon days of the Cold
War, during the era of Mao Zedong, when China was in the throes of the
"Cultural Revolution"  a mass ideological exorcism in
which "bourgeois capitalist-roaders" within the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) were sent to reeducation camps, and peasants were forced to
live in agricultural "communes," in which they worked, ate,
and slept together like a vast hive of worker bees. For Mao had not only
broken with the Kremlin, but deemed the Soviet "social imperialists"
far more dangerous than the United States. Nixon's trip to China signaled
the beginning of a wide-ranging strategic and military alliance between
the two nations. While a very few conservatives rallied around their old
ally, Taiwan, most proclaimed Nixonian diplomacy a stroke of genius and
from that moment on no more was heard about human rights violations in
China until well after the end of the Cold War.

HOW
RED IS CHINA?

After
Richard Nixon raised his glass in salute to the People's Republic, "Red"
China dropped entirely out of the conservative lexicon. The great problem
in reviving it is that a wave of reform has washed the redness out of
China so thoroughly that it is, today, not even a barely discernible pink.
Since the death of Mao, in 1979, and the ascension of Deng Xiaoping as
China's new "great helmsman," China has shed Marxist orthodoxy
in all but the formal sense. Far from promoting Marxist ideology, or serving
as the center of a revived worldwide Commie Conspiracy, the Chinese Communist
Party is presiding over the largest-scale destatization process ever attempted:
in "constructing socialism with Chinese characteristics," as
they put it, the heirs of Mao and the Long March are systematically dismantling
the economic foundations of socialism. Selling off state industries, not
only allowing but actively soliciting foreign investment, privatizing
land, cutting back on the military, setting up Special Economic Zones
in which the deadening hand of the Party and the bureaucracy is stayed
and the market allowed to flourish virtually unhampered  these and
a host of other radical measures have effectively abolished the economic
dictatorship of the Party and the State. The dour spirit of Maoist egalitarianism,
which exhorted China to "put politics in command," has given
way to a new form of "socialism" summed up by Deng in a famous
maxim: "To get rich is glorious!"

While
Chinese Marxist theoreticians insist on referring to their system as "market
socialism," it is no more socialist than the economies of Europe
and the United States  and no less. In many respects, the burgeoning
Chinese private sector is far less regulated than in the West.
China has no "civil rights" laws, no Chinese With Disabilities
Act, no affirmative action. Western commentators of the liberal persuasion
bemoan the lack of "social welfare' measures, such as workman's compensation,
and demand that Chinese be given the alleged "right" to organize
unions.

CHINA:
THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE

At
the end of Deng Xiaoping's life, in the final throes of his struggle against
the remaining orthodox Maoists in the CCP leadership, the aging leader
took to the stump and made his case to the Chinese people. Traveling throughout
South China, and touring the special economic zones, he argued forcefully
for more rapid privatization and the unleashing of market forces. As Orville
Schell puts it in his book, The
Mandate of Heaven, "Deng's nanxun [Southern tour]
had rammed Chinese society into reverse gear, stampeding the country into
a form of unregulated capitalism that made the U.S. and Europe seem almost
socialist by comparison."

With
the standard of living and growth rates rapidly rising, ordinary Chinese
have never been better off. But that does not satisfy the 'human rights"
crowd: far from it. China may be taking the capitalist road, they carp,
but it is still a long way from achieving "democracy." This
obsession with capital-d Democracy overshadowed Clinton's trip to China,
and so skewed the focus of the American media, and, ultimately, the President
himself, that the main subject of public discussion was not the dramatic
achievements of the post-Mao destatization, in which a billion people
lifted themselves up out of serfdom. Instead, the President engaged in
an hour-long colloquoy with Chinese premier Jiang Zemin on the 1989 Tiananmen
Square incident, in which a few hundred rioters bent on self-immolation
achieved their stated ends.

THE
MYTH OF TIANANMEN

The
Tiananmen Square "massacre" is an incident so wrapped up in
mythology, most of it generated by Western journalists and their professional
dissident friends, that it is nearly impossible for any "revisionist"
analysis to be given a hearing. The world saw the Goddess of Democracy,
the bright banners and youthful idealism of the protesters, a giant rock-concert
held under the gaze of the seemingly incongruous Chairman Mao, whose gargantuan
portrait dominates the Square.

Indelibly
etched on the popular mind is the image of a lone man standing in the
path of an oncoming tank. The tank moves to the left, and then to the
right, in a fruitless effort to avoid flattening him. This sequence of
events could serve as a kind of shorthand for the events leading up to
the infamous incident.

Ensconced
in the Square for weeks on end, the students were at first hailed by the
radical reform wing of the CCP, and even some of the more orthodox, as
the harbingers of a new spirit of "socialist democracy." Hu
Qili, the party chieftain in charge of press and propaganda at the time,
was in sympathy with the students' democratic demands, and gave the go-ahead
to the media to open up and begin to report what was happening in the
Square. The students were duly rewarded with a front-page photo and adulatory
news story in the May 5 issue of the official Peoples Daily.

That
is why those discount the recent student-led protests against the bombing
of China's Belgrade embassy as government-staged and therefore of limited
significance miss the point completely. These analysts are forgetting
that the most significant rebellion against the authority of the CCP was
praised and to a large extent engineered by a wing of the party bureaucracy.

On
May 18, the Daily pushed Gorbachev's visit to a small item below
the fold and ran six front-page stories on the student protest. Headlines
blared: "One million from All Walks of life Demonstrate in Support
of Hunger-Striking Students"; "Save the Students! Save the Children!"
Other newspapers in different areas of the country joined the chorus.
The Guangming Daily came out with seven front-page stories on the
tumultuous events in Beijing, and proclaimed: "The conditions of
the students and the future of the country touch the heart of every Chinese
who has a conscience."

THE
MYTH OF MONOLITHISM

American
commentators were surprised that the Jiang Zemin-Clinton debate on the
meaning of Tiananmen was broadcast live over the state-controlled television
network. Their astonishment is equaled only by their ignorance: the Chinese
media has been relatively open for some time. Since the Communist regime
was installed in 1949, the media has been a battleground in the ceaseless
factional conflicts within the Communist Party, and, to a certain extent,
in the country at large.

Mao's
"Hundred Flowers" campaign, followed by vicious repression,
made ordinary Chinese wary of such "opening up." Yet the Cultural
Revolution, a paroxysm of violence and collective madness, was ushered
in by an article in the Chinese press, and orchestrated by an extensive
media campaign that targeted the Communist Party itself as the seedbed
of capitalism reborn.

Before
the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the media was in the hands of reformers
and was bold enough to broadcast party chieftain Zhao Ziyang's indiscreet
remarks to Gorbachev, during the latter's visit, that Deng, although without
any official post, was really at the helm. In 1989, at the height of the
turmoil, the top leadership of the CCP met with the student rebels: the
entire proceedings were broadcast nationwide by CCTV. It is as if, during
the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, Mayor Daley and Hubert Humphrey
had agreed to "negotiate" with Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn, and
Abbie Hoffman while the cameras rolled.

THE
CHINESE NEW LEFT

In
understanding the politics and style of the Tiananmen Square protesters,
the New Left analogy is useful. For these were leftists, in a Chinese
context, in their ideology as well as in their provocative style.

From
the very beginning, the student rebels marched into the Square singing
the "Internationale," and toting portraits of Mao. According
to Lee Feigon's pro-student protester account of The
Meaning of Tiananmen, the leaders of a prominent student group,
who in alliance with city workers organized the Beijing Workers' Autonomous
Trade Union, "hung big pictures of Mao in the tents they pitched
on the square. They talked openly and boldly about the good old days of
the Cultural Revolution. Mao, they felt, had the right ideas, although
he sometimes used wrong tactics. Now they were determined to use what
they considered the right ones." [p. 211]

Those
tactics were as confrontational as any employed by any band of Yippies
that ever marched through the streets of American cities in the sixties.
The leadership of the student movement was fractious, and rarely spoke
in a single voice, but the elected "Supreme Commander" of the
Tiananmen Square encampment, Chai Lin, carried much moral authority, and
it was largely through her influence that thousands of students failed
to evacuate the Square even after word had reached them (reportedly from
Deng Xiaoping's son, Deng Pufang) that the tanks were rolling.

A
CHINESE JONESTOWN

That
Chai Lin welcomed death, and that the actions of her and her hardcore
followers amounted to a mass suicide, is clearly expressed by the "Supreme
Commander" herself in an interview conducted in late May, just before
the crackdown: "Some fellow students asked me what our plans are,
what our demands will be in future. This made me feel sick at heart; I
started out to tell them that what we were waiting for was actually the
spilling of blood, for only when the government descends to the depths
of depravity and decides to deal with us by slaughtering us, only when
rivers of blood flow in the Square, will the eyes of our country's people
truly be opened." [Cited in Han Minzhu, ed., Cries
for Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement
(Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), p. 327.]

Even
as more reasonable student leaders, like Wu'er Kaxi, argued that the students,
having made their point, should withdraw from the square and live to fight
another day, Chai Lin, the "Supreme Commander," commanded her
followers to stay and wait for martyrdom. Already embarked on a hunger
strike that had weakened and even completely debilitated many students,
they passively obeyed their fanatical "Commander." In style
and spirit, the massacre at Tiananmen Square is closer to Jonestown than
to a crusade for freedom.

Like
the American New Left of the sixties, the Chinese New Left movement that
reached its flaming apogee in Tiananmen Square employed radically self-dramatizing
means to achieve egalitarian and "revolutionary" ends. They,
too, held high the banner of Chairman Mao; like the Weathermen faction
of SDS, Chai Lin and her hardcore supporters not only expected repression
but openly hoped that their actions would provoke it.

ROOTS
OF THE MOVEMENT

As
Eric Margolis, foreign affairs editor of the Toronto Sun, so trenchantly
put it, the Tiananmen Square "massacre has become a 'cause celebre'
among fashionable leftists and literati, who have never forgiven China's
rulers for abandoning socialism."

This
reaction to the policies of Deng and his successors was not limited to
the West. It was reflected not only in the Maoist sympathies of some Chinese
students, but also in the broad demands put forward by the student movement.
Aside from vague assertions about the need for "democracy,"
the more concrete details of the students' program were remarkably pedestrian.
At the height of the reforms, with government subsidies to students cut
to the bone, intellectuals saw their incomes stay stagnant or even decrease
at a time when relatively uneducated peasants were going into business
and following Deng's maxim to get gloriously rich: while insisting on
their right to march, and to free speech the students also demanded "more
money for education and higher pay for intellectuals." [Feigon, p.
135]

A
1988 survey "showed that the average college graduate earned $9 per
month less than those who had not gone to college," and this widely
known fact energized much of the students' revolutionary fervor. What
Ludwig von Mises called "the anti-capitalistic mentality," so
endemic among intellectuals, who feel underappreciated and undervalued
by the market economy, was clearly at work here.

CHINESE
RACE RIOTS

Another
underreported aspect of the student movement, and the Tiananmen protest
of `89 was the politically incorrect racial aspect. While Chinese students
were forced to live 6 or 8 to a room no bigger than a closet, foreign
students sponsored by the Chinese government, primarily from Africa, were
given relatively luxurious quarters and good food, all gratis. Anti-African
protests broke out in the city of Hehai, ending in violence. Shouting
anti-black slogans the student militants rampaged through the Africans'
dormitories, roughed up all foreigners, and besieged local authorities.
Campus protests soon spread to Shanghai, Beijing, and elsewhere.

Anti-foreign
sentiment was a significant undercurrent of the Tiananmen Square rebellion.
On April 19, militants from the encampment marched on the living quarters
of the top Party leaders at the famous Zhongnanhai compound: screaming
insults at Deng, they also yelled "Kill the foreigners!" As
Lee Feigon, an eyewitness sympathetic to the students, relates: "The
police, in fact, seemed remarkably tolerant, appearing unflustered by
the constant jeering and screaming. Many who watched doubted that the
American Secret Service would have reacted so genially if a similar mob
were battering on the gates of the White House in the middle of the night.
This was carried to an extreme at about 2:30 a.m. when the police tried
to clear the crowd and some of them were pushed back onto a cluster of
fallen bicycles. One tough picked up one of the bikes and smashed it over
the head of one of the police. He was not arrested." [Ibid., p. 139.]

DENG'S
LONG MARCH

At
the height of the Cultural Revolution, a million Red Guards had answered
Chairman Mao's summons to assemble in Tiananmen Square and "make
revolution": the result had been a decade of turmoil and a Great
Leap Backward in terms of economic development. By the time Mao died,
virtually all institutions of higher learning had been closed down, and
in large parts of the country industrial production nearly ground to a
halt. Agriculture was also seriously hampered: China could barely feed
her starving millions.

Deng
personally suffered during this ultra-leftist interregnum: not only was
he stripped of his positions and banished to the countryside, where he
served in a "work brigade," but he was denounced as "China's
number-two capitalist-roader" (Zhou Enlai being Number One). His
son, Deng Pufang, was attacked by a mob of frenzied Red Guards and thrown
out of a window at Beijing University: he was paralyzed from the waist
down.

THE
CULTURAL REVOLUTION

The
"Gang of Four," led by Madame Mao, the Chairman's depraved and
vicious wife, directed a reign of terror at Deng and many other longtime
CCP veterans. A ruthless egalitarianism was enforced, and everyone in
a position of authority or tainted by expertise was ruthlessly "criticized"
until they confessed in public to being "capitalist roaders."
All material incentives were abolished, and instead central planners counted
on ideological zeal to boost industrial production. Thousands of years
of Chinese culture were expunged, as Red Guards smashed priceless artwork
and looted ancient Buddhist monasteries, in a relentless campaign against
the "ghosts and monsters" of the "feudal" past. Madame
Mao, in her youth a movie actress of minor repute, took a special interest
in "revolutionizing" culture. The traditional Chinese opera
was banned, as a reactionary relic, and replaced by a series of "revolutionary"
operas.

As
the orgy of destruction reached its climax, Richard Nixon chose to make
his rapprochement with the Beijing regime. The cementing of this alliance
against the Soviet Union signaled by his famous trip to the People's Republic.
While Clinton was regaled with displays of traditional Chinese culture
at its most elaborate, Nixon's entertainment was confined to a performance
of "The Red Detachment of Women," one of Madame Mao's "revolutionary"
ballets.

As
British journalist James Pringle recalled, "Mao's sour-faced wife
. . . hosted Nixon at a rather grubby theatre for the performance, and
he smiled as she told him that the face on a target that the people's
heroes were firing at was that of Chiang Kai-shek," the Nationalist
Chinese dictator of Taiwan, who still claimed suzerainty over all China
 and who, up until that moment, had been our staunch ally.

A
RIGHTIST WIND

Mao
used the Red Guards to destroy his enemies in the Party, but in the end
he balked at turning over power to his wife and her coterie. As the country
descended into chaos, Mao pulled back: the Red Guards were told to return
to their universities and workplaces. The army was called in to quell
the 'revolutionary" fervor of the Maoist mobs, and the "Cultural
Revolution Group" that ran the Party's propaganda machine was chastened
by the Chairman if not yet silenced

With
the ultra-leftists reined in, Mao called many of the purged "rightists"
back into government service, Deng among them. Though the reformist group
was reinstalled in the top leadership of the party by the rehabilitated
Zhou Enlai, the hard-line Maoists were still a threat to any hope of reform.
The hard-liners were still entrenched in many areas of the country, notably
in Shanghai, Madame Mao's base of operations and traditionally a leftist
stronghold.

THE
DEATH OF ZHOU EN LAI

When
Zhou died, in 1976, an article appeared in a Shanghai newspaper accusing
Zhou of having been a "capitalist-roader." The piece was widely
interpreted as being a not-so-veiled attack on Deng. In late March, which
is the time Chinese traditionally honor their dead ancestors, the Chinese
people responded to the attacks by laying wreaths on public monuments
honoring Zhou: 30 wreathes were hung in Tiananmen Square, and hundreds
of thousands of demonstrators poured into the square.

After
five days, during which the government was paralyzed by internal conflict,
the police confronted the demonstrators; as many as one hundred were killed,
and thousands arrested. Deng had reportedly been placed under house arrest
even before the crackdown, and after the demonstrators were quashed he
was once again purged from the leadership, relieved of all his positions
in the party and the government, and sent into internal exile.

DENG
TRIUMPHANT

But
not for long. Mao's death, and the downfall of the Gang of Four at the
hands of the army, soon returned Deng to power. Although he led China
into a new era of modernization and economic development, with an annual
growth rate of nearly 10 percent, the bitter legacy of the Cultural Revolution
was still fresh in Deng's mind, more than twenty years later, as the universities
erupted once more. The man who had faced down Madame Mao and her fanatic
Red Guards, and even replaced Mao as the great helmsman of the nation,
was not about to turn the country over this latest bunch of self-proclaimed
student revolutionaries.

Contrary
to the myth of "Red China" as a monolithic political entity
whose subjects march in lockstep with an all-powerful Communist regime,
the history of the country since the sixties had been one of uninterrupted
political turmoil. Deng, determined to build a prosperous China out of
the ashes of Maoism, put a stop to it. When the students once again filled
Tiananmen Square, carrying portraits of Mao, and calling for the overthrow
of the government, he was determined that it would not happen again. In
the context of Chinese politics and history since the sixties, the Tiananmen
Square insurrection of `89 was a leftist, implicitly anti-capitalist reaction
to Deng's program of economic reform, albeit one aided and abetted by
radical reformists in the Communist Party itself.

THE
NEW
EVIL
EMPIRE?

In
terms of sheer scope and mendacity, the propaganda campaign unleashed
in this country against China rivals anything cooked up by Madame Mao
and her cohorts during the Cultural Revolution. While the Tiananmen square
myth is emblematic of the grotesque fiction concocted by the China-bashers,
their campaign to conjure a new Yellow Peril has concentrated on three
major areas designed to appeal to the three major components of the anti-China
coalition:

1)
The Military "Threat"  The assertion that China represents
a military threat to the United States is proof that no idea is so obviously
erroneous that some alleged "expert" somewhere has not endorsed
it. Unlike the U.S., China is cutting back on its "defense"
spending: Chinese military expenditures were reduced by 25 percent during
the mid-eighties, and since then the increases have fallen below the inflation
rate. The three-million-man Peoples' Liberation Army is half conscripts,
equipped with hopelessly outdated weaponry, and burdened by mind-boggling
logistics problems.

2)
The hypocrisy and insincerity of the Republican warmongers in Congress
who rail about Chinese nuclear missiles, supposedly aimed at American
cities, was underscored by their response to the most substantial achievement
of the Sino-American summit: the agreement by both parties to de-target
their nukes. Everybody knows that they can be re-targeted in a matter
of minutes, was the Republicans' reply. But if that is so, then no
agreement is worth anything  and we should go to war and be done
with it. By this mad "logic," a nuclear first strike against
Beijing is justified on the grounds that it would eliminate long-range
missiles that could, at any moment, be re-targeted at American cities.

Republicans
accuse Clinton of selling militarily sensitive satellite technology to
the Chinese government in exchange for a few hundred thousand dollars
in campaign contributions. The irony is that the real use of this technology
is to launch communications satellites, such as AsiaSat, which allows
the growing number of Chinese satellite dishes aimed in its direction
to bypass the state-controlled media and tune in to the worldwide buzz.
In the name of anti-Communism, these new Cold Warriors are willing to
throw away the most powerful weapon in the anti-Communist arsenal.

CHINA
AND CHRISTIANITY

3) The Religious Angle  Pat Robertson has descried the anti-China
lobby gathering force among religious conservatives as "morally irresponsible
and politically ignorant. Few things bring people together like a common
enemy," he writes. "To some, China has done a masterful job
of playing the villain. The China bashers prosper in direct mail and media
campaigns, but they do not have the weight of righteousness on their side."
[Wall Street Journal, June 30, 1998]

This
nails the Sinophobes' lobby for what it is: a cynical attempt to cash
in on the gullibility of all too many conservatives, who are sincere in
their anti-Communism but know next to nothing about China. Wiliiam McGurn,
editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, and for many years associated
with the conservative National Review, said it best. While not
arguing that Beijing has established freedom of religion, he writes: "When
American critics declare that things are getting worse, it prompts the
great unasked question: Compared with what?" The "criticism
now leveled by American Christian activists seems less a snapshot of China
in the late 1990s than a caricature drawn from the high days of Maoism
a generation ago."

Christian
churches were closed during the Cultural Revolution: Bibles were forbidden,
all religious proselytizing was banned, and believers were often imprisoned,
tortured, and killed. Today, government-sanctioned "patriotic"
churches, including Catholics and the various Protestant denominations,
function openly: Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network has aired
its programs over state-run television. While there has been some resistance
on the part of local Party officials to the cultural implications of China's
opening up to the West, these are isolated incidents that go against the
national trend.

China's
long march toward capitalism and freedom is in danger of stalling: "capitalist-roaders"
like Deng and his successors, have had to face not only domestic enemies
who long to restore Maoism, but enemies abroad intent on putting obstacles
in their path. A new Cold War, with China cast in the Soviet role, would
put China, as well as much of the world, on an altogether different road.